Fighting Back (UK title: Death Vengeance)[2] is a 1982 vigilante action thriller film written by Thomas Hedley Jr and David Zelag Goodman and directed by Lewis Teague.

[3] The film stars Tom Skerritt,[4] Patti LuPone,[5] Michael Sarrazin,[6][7] Yaphet Kotto,[8][9] David Rasche,[10] Lewis Van Bergen,[11] Earle Hyman,[12][13] and Ted Ross.

[14] The film opens with Philadelphia television reporters viewing and broadcasting a news story about violence in society since JFK's assassination in 1963.

After D'Angelo's house is burglarized and their dog is killed, the film cuts to the reporters' studio footage of Anthony Imperiale ten years after the 1967 Newark riots, self-defense classes in Beverly Hills, various target practice sessions and the Guardian Angels on patrol in New York City.

To make their first stand and to introduce themselves to the neighborhood, the group goes to a dirty bar in town known for being a hot spot for criminals, including Eldorado and his men.

The film was rumored to be based on the story of Anthony Imperiale, a former city councilman in Newark, New Jersey, who organised a vigilante group.

The producer, Dino De Laurentiis, had enjoyed a big box office success with an earlier vigilante movie, Death Wish.

[18][19] Patti Lupone later said "I don't know what to say about the experience except that I respected my co stars and my director, I had a lot of fun making it and I play a harried Italian housewife.

It approaches and touches the matters of racism, political opportunism, civil rights, vigilante tactics and the process of law, but it does not come to extreme conclusions about them.

Fighting Back is set in an Italian neighborhood of Philadelphia, where a storekeeper, played by Tom Skerritt, is outraged by an incident on the streets that results in his pregnant wife losing the baby and by a robbery in which his mother's ring finger is cut off.

"[23] Critic Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote in his review: "Fighting Back is a lurid glorification of urban vigilantism remotely inspired by the career of Anthony Imperiale, the charismatic community leader of riled and fearful Italian-American residents in Newark in the late '60s.

Imperiale himself is recalled in newsreel clips in the course of the movie, which opens for no justifiable reason with a medley of traumatic documentary footage, from the assassination of President Kennedy through the assassination attempts on President Reagan and Pope John Paul II.... All of them are impressively overqualified for the minimal, motley quality of illusion that Fighting Back is content to confuse with effective contemporary melodrama.